trans*substance

I have spent around 20 years lost before beginning my preparation for death and rebirth. I have prepared for confirmation in a name of my choosing.

God is with us.

He has called me by name. He has knit my inmost being. He created me as I am, knowing my creation necessitates suffering and death.

It is a process familiar to all Christians, but known to Jesus and to trans people.

Jesus was born both as himself and as something foreign: divine and human. When he was denied, God was with him. He was dehumanized, but he had God. When his humanity was finished, as a dual being, he came to his full divinity.

Trans people too are born as two in one: not quite one or the other and yet completely both. We must die to our old lives to achieve a whole. We become one body through our experiences as self-made beings. We are all brothers, sisters, siblings. What you do to one of us, you do to us all. We are one blood. When one of us is born, we are all born. We have eternal life. When we die, we are born into a new life and into an existence bigger than our own, one that carries through us all. We achieve eternity through a shared being.

On Good Friday, the Lord spoke to me—a phrase I do not use lightly and a feeling I have never felt before—saying, “I too have suffered. It is not just you. They would forsake even me, the Son and King. And just as God is with me in my suffering, He is with you.”

And so I say to my trans siblings, know that on this Holy Week, the Lord knows you, understands you, and has suffered as you have suffered. God is with me and so too is God with you.

We will be denied, we will be scared, but we will do what we must. In Holy Week, death is not the end of the story. Christ is risen and so are we.